plugins

Can you run-down how you guys handle posting your stock photos for each site? I know you use Creative Commons most of the time, but what are your criteria for picking photos? Do you maintain a database of photos that you think might work with future articles, just to cut down on time, or do you search and hope for the best?

I use a WordPress plugin called Edit Flow to help manage the Empire's editorial processes, and one of the many awesome things it does is emails me a notification when an editor creates a draft here on offbeatempire.com.

A few minutes ago, I got this email:[Offbeat Empire] New Post Created: "How to"

Now, you need to know that each post goes through multiple editors' digital hands before I see it — first one of site's editors produces it and edits it, and then Caroline, our copyeditor combs it over for typos before I do a final review. You also need to know that Caroline has a Masters Degree in American Studies.

As if this week wasn't crazy enough with the reader survey going on (you HAVE taken it, right?), there was also a new version of Wordpress released. As part of the update, we updated several of our plugins and added a couple news ones. Here's what you might be noticing…

It's no secret that I bet the farm when I built the Offbeat Empire on WordPress. My developer, Jennifer M. Dodd, suggested way back in 2006 that we tap into WordPress's open source platform and a big part of that was the active plugin development community around WordPress.

In the years since, we've tested out hundreds of plugins. Some of them have become mission critical — to the point where I literally couldn't do business without them. Others of them, unfortunately, have been so poorly coded that Jennifer has scolded me for installing them on our server. (ACK! That's the risk with open source code…)

In the interest of spreading the awesomeness around, here are the plugins that the Empire literally could not function without:

Lately, my Chief Technology Officer/web developer J.M. Dodd has been doing more and more custom WordPress plugin development. I'll ping her with a request ("Can we make it so that we can easily see a list of Offbeat Bride vendor listings that are expiring in a given month?") and she'll spend some time whipping up a custom plugin that does exactly what I need to to.

Part of why the two of us work so well together is so we're both so passionate about using web development to solve the problems of doing business. I get a genuine buzz out of identifying a problem ("It's really hard for my sales rep to see which listings are expiring…"), pitching a solution ("J.M. Dodd, what if we had a drop down menu on WordPress's main Edit Posts page that showed Expiration by month?"), and then seeing J.M. Dodd work her magic to make it happen. After the magic occurs, there's some serious nerding out and gloating that generally happens:

Hey there! Welcome to the Offbeat Empire

Offbeat Empire LLC is a niche publisher of awesome wedding and lifestyle websites. We have about 1.5 million monthly readers.

We want to help our readers find ways to express their truest, most authentic, badass selves. We aim to be inclusive and intelligent, while also keeping a sense of humor about ourselves and the world. We're all about supporting smarties worldwide as they navigate the big life transitions that are steeped in responsibility and expectation.